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Editorial snapshots from the nation's press

Pitcher Sean Newcomb of the Atlanta Braves during an Aug. 7 game in Washington, DC. (Patrick McDermott / Getty Images North America)

$1B tax cut for the top 1 percent? That's rich

President Donald Trump's tax package, which included a cut in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, went into effect on Jan. 1. As a result, corporate taxes paid have dropped this year by one-third. And the Office of Management and Budget has hiked its 10-year deficit projection by $1 trillion since January.

The annual deficit, up 20 percent so far in 2018, will reach $1 trillion next year. A level of shortfall once considered catastrophic even during an economic crisis is now the norm even during boom times. But apparently, the administration feels even more fiscal carnage is called for.

Now the Trump administration is considering a plan to create another $100 billion in tax cuts almost exclusively for the wealthy. The Trump plan under consideration involves reinterpreting the word "cost" in the IRS code so that people selling assets can adjust their taxable profits on capital gains downward by indexing for inflation. Former President George H. W. Bush considered such a change through regulation more than 25 years ago, but deemed an end run around Congress to be illegal. Trump would need 60 Senate votes to pass it, which is unlikely.

Analysis has concluded that more than 84 percent of the benefit would go to the top 1 percent of earners. More than 63 percent of that $100 billion would go to the richest 325,000 taxpayers in the country. It's a very bad idea.

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— Newsday

Fleeting mistakes live forever online

"I am forever grateful that I got to be young and stupid before virality was invented." So said Lydia Polgreen, editor in chief of HuffPost, in a tweet on Aug. 2. By the next day, it had been retweeted hundreds of times and "liked" by thousands of readers.

Sean Newcomb may wish he had been born a generation ago. The Atlanta Braves left-hander, age 25, came within a strike of pitching a no-hitter — and was barely done when he was confronted with Twitter posts he had put up in 2011 and 2012 using racial and homophobic slurs. Washington Nationals shortstop Trea Turner was busted for making similar tweets when he was in high school.

All apologized, with Hader saying, "I was young, immature and stupid. There is no excuse for that to happen." All three will have considerable work to do rehabilitating their reputations and making amends for their nasty online remarks. Being in high school when you expressed bigoted sentiments certainly does not relieve you of the obligation to show that you've reformed.

But these incidents are evidence of the hazards of living in an age when youthful stupidity can attain immortality. Likewise for not-so-youthful stupidity, as tech journalist Sarah Jeong, a Korean-American who was born in 1988, was reminded. Shortly after she was hired by The New York Times, she found herself called to account for caustic tweets aimed at white people. Jeong, who said she was "counter-trolling" harassers, also apologized.

When news breaks of youngsters being embarrassed or ruined by stupid things they said or did online, a lot of their elders say, "There but for the grace of the World Wide Web go I." A few decades ago, kids could graduate from high school without fear that their worst decisions or utterances would haunt them for life. Then, a brief lapse of judgment could be just that — brief, and soon forgotten. But the internet never forgets.

Each such revelation is a reminder that humans are universally fallible but often capable of reform. So citizens of the 21st century may need to fashion some informal new customs for the treatment of such sins and missteps. And we suspect there will be a shift toward a slightly more charitable treatment.

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